Once upon a lifetime there was a little girl with a olive complexion, eyes like her Grandmother Rhoda...dark brown, pigtails, scrawny legs and arms and rag-a-muffin dresses made of tiny prints and eyelet trim.
Who lived in a remodeled OLD Swedish Church with STEEP stairs, smack dab in the middle of a farm.
This little girl didn't have other little girls to play with, rather there were only boys who liked to climb haystacks, jump from sloping metal roofs into piles of hay, and splash through irrigation ditches.
She went along with WHATEVER....
But alone in her bedroom she lived in another world....no BOYS, no ANIMALS, no HAY STACKS,
no ICY COLD IRRIGATION WATER.
Alone....not for long...as there was her constant IMAGINATION to entertain her.
Crayola Crayons for Katy Keene paper dolls with daring bosoms, (they were dressed cowgirl style),
old Victorian storybooks her Aunt L. gave to her...full of amazing black and white illustrations
a deep dark closet to hide out in
and pasture grass to lay flat on her back, dream on the clouds and whistle away dandelion tufts.
Pretty good childhood.
But one day, the girl with the olive complexion had somehow managed to get a package of CLOVE chewing gum. AH, the aroma, the spicy chew...yum. She fell asleep daydreaming, no less.
She awoke to her undone pigtails glued together with tasteless dull gray sticky GUM.
Into the deep tub.
Out with the soap, the oil, nothing budged that gum.
Scissors
Chop chop chop
no more pigtails.
The little girl with the olive complexion grew up to have children of her own, a husband, grandchildren, a home, a lovely life
and there was more.
She loved to draw, paint and make things.
And out of her past tumbled images of playing in a big bathtub, her hair grown back and siblings to play with.
Smiles: Sharon
